We all are struggling with the current Forum editor when redacting. Most of us don't know all the possibilities of the Markdown language and it's not really user-friendly right now, for the following reasons:

1. Preview is slow, needs page reload.
2. Markdown format is not properly implemented, doesn't respect the standard Markdown format. (no bullet list, no image)
3. Doesn't allow the use of HTML (this feature currently is in the Pipeline)

Here is some improvements I'd like to propose:

1. Real-time preview. Editor on the left side of the screen, preview on the right. Synchronized scrolling when content gets big.
2. Proper Markdown format, with enhancers. (tables, footnotes, abbreviations ...)
3. Mix of Markdown/HTML possible.

All of this can be done using https://markdown-it.github.io/ library (the link is a demo, check it out!).

It's free and open-source. And it's backward compatible with our current format, meaning it won't break current posts.

I believe it would provide a much better user experience when writing or editing posts. What do you think?

Actually implimenting a markdown framework that works is definitely a move forwards.

I don't see significant advantages to a realtime preview - not every post wants this. So very few would it actually be productive and from a pure bandwidth persepctive then only sending the finished product as opposed to collecting and sending every keyboard action is far more efficient. The only possible practical use to the realtime sampling of user input is if you want to archive all the keypresses for later analysis leading to things like behavoural profiling.

Sanitising posts of HTML output is something IMHO that should continue - the least number of things passed to the client that can be executed the better. It's only time before that's abused. You certainly want to minimise third party input that can be executed.

The Editor works on the frontend. No keyboard entry is set on the backend, no bandwidth taken at all whether you want the real-time preview or not. I guess I got you confused with the term "real-time", I was talking about the end-user experience, not client-server real-time related stuff.

About the HTML sanitation, I don't know how the plugin actually works. I guess it stores it all as a mix between HTML/Markdown. I just tried to add a < script >< /script > (without spaces) for instance and it treated it as plain text. I believe such usual cases are correctly handled. I invite you trying other alternatives as code-injection goes. ;)

I recommended the usage of real MarkDown 2 month ago. There are also libraries available allowing us to implement custom tags and properly sanitize HTML input to avoid cross-side scripting. None of them were implemented yet nor were any response about a possible implementation or consideration about such features.

If those feedbacks are given to the Officials, I'm not even sure they reach the IT team. And it they do then it's a one-way process because I've never any feedback from any suggestion since the beginning either. Feels quite pointless.

Thanks to not existing transparency we will never know what really happens.